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9/15/2020
R&Ded into Renderman for blender today. Acording to this post (http://www.cgchannel.com/2020/09/blender-to-get-official-renderman-plugin/) blender 2.9 which just dropped a few weeks ago has offical support for renderman, so I won't have to use the fan made addon. I also found a site that lists and compares renderfarms and what they are compatable with, and concluded that there were, in fact, many good renderfarm options for blender prman rendering. 2.9 is pretty new though, so I may want to contact some of these sites directly to ask if they will support 2.9 by October XX.
9/12/2020
Need to R&D Hair BSDF for use in grass
9/11/2020
Looking into dispersion
Work on grass asset
Really made progress with grass - see pic. Rendering is slow though, I'll need to see how to speed it up
Grass texture needs to clip the alpha in order to play well with the mist pass. You can do this in blender with a colourramp node though
Turns out transparancy is the issue, every time cycles passes a ray though a transparent node surface, it must cast the ray AGAIN, resulting in a performance hit when I have ~20 transparent surfaces lined up. (see: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/introduction.html?highlight=cycles%20transparent%20node)
I'll need to do one of two things:
-Make geometry based grass
-See if I can workaround this with OSL
- I am doubtful this will work.
I wonder if renderman is better suited for lots of transparency. It seemed to treat it differently, with it's 'presence' system.
I did some quick research into how renderman works with transparency. It uses a "stochastic sampling technique" that is very efficient at binary transparency. For what i am working with, I envy that, though it seems to be less suited for rendering partial (0.5) transparency, as this causes noise. I think it is similiar to "hashed" transparency in Eevee in the way that it works.
See: https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN23/Presence+and+Opacity
One day I'm going to go down the rabbit hole of writing my own render engine, but alas, today is not that day
9/10/2020
I need to figure out tabletop photography
R&D tabletop photography
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9/14/2020
Joe liked my new logo. I need to finish the font of 'CG', and make a black and white version. I think that I can do this with freestyle stroke rendering which will also allow me to export a vertor version of the logo from blender. It will, however have faciting due to how SVGs are converted into paths in blender.
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Got the 'CG' letters created in a style that matches the logo text. I am considering spelling out 'Computer Graphics' though, since as my potential clients (more industrial solutions focused) may be less aware of the feild of digital art.
4/10/20
It seems that arnold in houdini is broken on the school computers. Houdini otherwise works fine apart from this, so I did not catch this until now. I am still working on trying to fix this.
The houdini file that I was given has some sort of issue with it. The colosseum, nor any other geometry does not appear. I have not communicated this issue yet, but plan to do so shortly.
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I opened a few other files to see if any of those would work. Apparently some will, like the lower screenshot in the picture on the left.
This is the temporary home of my blog for VSFX 408 and beyond. I will be moving to a non-wix site in the near future